At first Denis found her an unmitigated nuisance. It was bad enough to put up with her when it was calm; but on a day of storm and tempest, with a fifty-mile gale—then to be interrupted by rosy-hopeful youth clamoring for a lesson—it was intolerable! Nature had never designed Denis for a teacher. He would have crushed a stupid pupil. He was hard even on Dorothea, when she failed to know what he hadn't told her. But she was so eager, pliant, uncrushable, so ardently in earnest, so reverent in attention, so insinuating in meekness: in a word, she flattered him so sweetly that he began, unconsciously at first, yet surely, he began to enjoy teaching her.
Even if there had been no question of Trent, Dorothea and Harry Gardiner would never have made friends. They had nothing in common. She, a little materialist, living in her feelings, caring not a rap for the pleasures of the mind or fancy; he, a restless thinker, imaginative, uneven in grain, too close in sympathy with nature to be wholly civilized. That strain of wildness would keep him always solitary; but Dorothea, though she had never yet had a chance to find herself, was essentially a home woman. She wanted to adore, to be ruled by, to mother her man in the good old-fashioned way. All that would simply have bored Gardiner. To Denis, on the other hand, it was the ideal of married life.
They sat side by side, his hands over hers, guiding the aeroplane, and he forgot she was a woman. Not till then did her womanhood begin to make its impression. She had attracted Gardiner, the man of reason, through his senses, she attracted Denis, the man of instinct, through his reason. He liked the quick answer of her mind to his own. Then one day she met with an accident; her hand was grazed by the propeller. Had it struck her full it would have shorn off her fingers in a moment, and even as it was she was badly bruised. Denis ordered her to see a doctor. Dorothea, pale but valiant, wanted to go on with her lesson.
"It's the first fine day we've had this week," she pleaded. "I shall never, never fly if I stop for every miserable little trifle!"
"I shouldn't think of lettin' you," said Denis, grim and peremptory. "You've broken one of the small bones, as likely as not."
"That I haven't!" retorted Dorothea, giving the hand a vigorous shake to emphasize her words. Denis seized her arm.
"Do not do that! Don't you feel pain?"
"Yes, of course I do, but I can't be bothered to think about it when I'm enjoying myself, can I?"
She stamped her foot, so absurdly enraged that Denis could not help laughing. Her unceremonious fortitude appealed to him, just as her pretended sensibility, when she cut her foot, had appealed to Gardiner. Odd that in each case the quality that drew them was the precise opposite of what each really asked for in a woman!
Dorothea had to give way; she went to a doctor, and was forbidden to use the hand. This cut her off from her car as well as from flying, for if she couldn't drive herself she wouldn't be driven. "Sit by and see a hateful hired chauffeur doing my work? No, thank you!" said she. So she sulked at Bredon, and Denis went back to his desk. He had "scrapped" the old seaplane, lock, stock and barrel, and was working on a new design, "a boat that would fly rather than an aeroplane that would float," of his favorite monoplane type. Denis had long wanted to build a monoplane which should be for the English air service what Blériots and Moranes were for the French, or Taubes for the German; and as he wished to show his new model at the Aero Exhibition in the spring, he had his work cut out. The fever of invention was upon him. Yet he missed his tiresome, charming pupil. In the brief lucid intervals when he came to the surface, he was conscious of a vague discomfort which neither beef nor bed availed to soothe. Her accident and the delay were giving time for his feelings to mature. Gardiner, who was interested in his own mental processes, would soon have found himself out; Denis, a stranger to self-consciousness, was blind as any well-brought-up young lady of the fifties.